Saturday, March 12, 2005

That line from the musical "Oliver!" pretty much sums up our day. We went to Your DeKalb Farmers' Market - yes, "Your" is part of the name - as well as Whole Foods. We bought every organic fruit and vegetable known to man and even some grain-fed, antibiotic-free, free-roaming, daily-manicured and aromatherapized chicken. We will probably eat none of this, however; it's for Gabriel.

He now has the entire top shelf of the freezer just for his food. He has apples, bananas, pears, sweet potatoes, corn, peas, and chicken, not to mention spelt (wheat-free) bagels in case he wants something to gnaw on. There are papayas and mangoes, and some more bananas, pears, and peas waiting to be prepared and countless things in jars. We also gave him his first cookie today, an arrowroot biscuit both for teething and so he can learn to eat finger foods. He loved it - that is, until he threw it on the floor.

For dinner, we had pad thai with peanuts and lime, rice with "rat-s*#@" chili fish sauce (sorry, that's what they're called), and salads. Our wine was pretty much drowned out by all the spice, but it's so totally good that we couldn't wait until tomorrow to open it. It's called "Chard-No-Way", and Darren, who owns the restaurant down the block, Toast, introduced us to it.

Jack called home today to say that bad weather has left them at Al Asad airfield for some time. The helicopter can only transport about 25 troops at a time, so he's working about 4 hours a day doing flight manifests for the time being. To find it on the map, look in the northwest of the country, not too far beneath the Euphrates River. After clicking on the northwest part of the country to zoom in, it should be recentered to find the airfield.

In other news, there was a shooting downtown that was all over every news program today. A criminal shot his judge, the court stenographer, and two deputies (one of whom survived) and escaped by a series of carjackings. We live about a mile north of this courthouse and have parked in the garage where the carjackings took place several times. We've been in the area countless times, but today wasn't one of them. We can't figure out how he got away from that many law enforcement types. On the bright side, it's a good thing that it didn't happen tomorrow because it will be family day there.

We got some digital camera photos today in the mail from two different companies. They weren't that much different from each other, but we thought that Shutterfly was slightly better than dotphoto. We also sent film to Snapfish to be developed, put online, and printed, but they haven't yet received it.

We also tested several programs to download music, because we have an MP3 player and are excited to put new music on it now that we have this computer. Napster is quick, easy, and well-organized, but the songs can only be downloaded in MP3 format with a certain type of subscription. If only downloading songs to burn on CD or listen to on the computer, it's great. Morpheus is a peer-to-peer program that was pretty difficult to use. Every time we chose a song, it said that the host had gone offline. Finally, we tried Kazaa, which works great for MP3 downloads. Both Napster and Kazaa were very quick, and the songs are of good quality. For CDs we will be using Napster, and for our MP3 player we will be using Kazaa.